The iPhone 3GS and the Storm

I am sure there are about a million posts on the Internet comparing the iPhone to the Blackberry Storm (and soon, the new Storm 2). This, as they say, is one of them.

I have an iPhone 3GS as my personal phone, and I recently got a BB Storm as my work unit. It replaced a much unloved Blackberry 8830. I did not expect to like the new Storm as much as the 3GS, and I do not. It has been pretty much exactly what I thought it would be. It is better than the 8830 in most ways though.

Chiclets

At the core of my dislike for the 8830 were two things: Crummy (small) screen and tiny mechanical keys. I am firmly in the virtual keyboard camp. I had a slight hope that the Storm's virtual keyboard would be better than it is, even though none of the reviews supported that hope. I based it off one thing: That every review I read of the Storm virtual keyboard was that it was *not* a mechanical one, like a proper BlackBerry should have.

I had not really realized it till I was reading about the Storm ahead of getting one but there is a huge contingent of people that like... even prefer... mechanical keyboards on their cell phones. Watching someone that is really good at the BB keyboard is pretty amazing, I have to admit: Their thumbs blazing at what is probably 50 or 60 WPM.

Getting going that fast on the 3GS would be a real challenge, and doing it in the Storm would not be possible. The Storm does have a virtual keyboard, but it is hampered by several things:

1. The processor is too slow / the OS is too slow. I do not know which it is (I have the 3rd release of 4.7: The latest Verizon has issued), but there are pauses and herks and jerks that keep the keyboard from being a fast-to-register-a-keystroke affair.


2. The entire screen has to be pressed to register the keystroke. the Storm 2 is supposed to fix that. I supposed the idea was to make the virtual keyboard more like a real one, and it utterly missed the point *of* a virtual keyboard.


3. The idea of the feedback to register the keystroke was the illuminate the key being pressed is blue, with a slight halo: All well and good, except I have wide fingers and I can't see it.

For all of this, I prefer the Storm keyboard to the 8830. I can at least read the markings, and the blue backlight of the 8830 was useless in the dark: I had to find a strong light source to use the keyboard.

The 3GS keyboard is more or less the same as it has been since the Generation 1 iPhone, except that more apps work in landscape mode, and in landscape mode I can fairly fly on the iPhone. Not as fast as the Mini 9, or the Macbook, but not too bad either.

Screen and Flip

The Storm display is very nice, and reading email on it is *far* easier than the 8830 every was. It is not just the size of the screen, or its better colors and backlighting, although those are all huge helps: it is also that the email app uses a better, more readable font, and when you are looking at letters that small, that really helps.

The apps listing is OK: Readable, if not easy to configure. The 3GS's way of allowing icons to be re-arranged is infinitely better than the setup process you have to use on the Storm, but at least it can be done.

The Storm 2 is supposed to add inertia to the screen flips, and that is sorely missed. Having to page up and down the screens on the storm is far slower than being able to flip your finger on the 3GS and the faster you do it, the faster and farther then screen rolls, in a very intuitive way.

Looking at pictures on the Storm is way better than the 8830, and nearly as nice as the 3GS, but pan and zoom are horrible.

Smile

The quality of the 3.2 MegaPixel camera is OK, and not that much worse than the iPhone (in bright light), but once again slowed either by the OS or a slow processor: it takes forever to focus and snap a picture on the Storm. Movies looked more or less the same on either unit though. The Storm overall seems to favor slight overexposure of the images relative to the iPhone.

In low light, the Storm camera is far better than the iPhone's, other than having to wait forever for it to focus. It also has a "light", which I have never used, but should mean that the Storm is good for even lower light situations than those I have tested: Places where the iPhone would not work at all.

Going to the Store

This really has very little to do with the Storm per-se, since the same App StoreWorldthingy is on all BlackBerries. It is easier to "shop" on the storm, with its superior-to-keyboarded-BB's screen. If this comparison was to any other BB, then Storm would be killer here. However, the 85,000+ apps of the iPhone, and the far better in-phone store app, not to mention the iTune Store shopping option just make the BB's couple of hundred apps appear quite feeble. Wimpy. Not even trying.

The few apps I have loaded are also pale shadows of their iPhone brethren. The Facebook app for example is truly wretched on the Storm. I can not imagine what it is like on any of the smaller screened BB's. The new 2.x iPhone version is in some way better than the web interface.

The Web

The built in browser on the BB used to be a joke. The one on the Storm is actually not too bad. It is slow, and does not render everything the 3GS built in Safari will, but it is light years ahead of the old browser. I put Opera on, and that helps, especially for things like zooming in on areas of pages to be able to read them.

None of them use the gestures of the iPhone, and in Safari, with flicks and pinches and amazing speed, the web is still more accessible on the iPhone.

Maps

Really RIM? Why did you even bother? The built in Map app is a complete waste. No OS integration. No gestures. No resolution in the maps. No composite views. No GPS or Compass integration. Low resolution. Slow slow slow. Not even trying. The Storm 2 or at least OS 5 *has* to have a better map app than this... right? Or at least Google maps in the app store?

This app is the very definition of a checkbox exercise:

"Hey! They have a map app! Do we have a map app?"

"Yeah Boss: We got a map app. Got it right here. See, It says 'Maps' on it and everything."

I went to our office in Minneapolis this week, and I was told that people with Tom Toms and other GPS had gotten utterly lost because of how weird it is to get to the building. I'll have to admit that the iPhone Maps gave me some choices about possible locations, and the first one I went to was not it: but the second one was, and it knew the weird route to get to the building. All the really means is that Google knows that route though, and that is what the BB needs: Google Maps.

(update: I have been told by some that there are Google Maps for the BB. They are just not in the App Store. You have to manually install them.)

Verizon and AT&T

My Storm came from Verizon, and of course the iPhone is AT&T. I have to say that I do not understand anyone that says that AT&T's network is not as good as Verizon's. I can not imagine where that is. It is no place I go.

At any given place, and at any given time, the iPhone and the Storm have about even chances of having or not having a signal. And I can move two feet, and have signals invert in strength between the two, especially in downtown areas.

Standing on Fishermans Wharf in San Francisco, both are strong. In North Beach at Rogue Public Ale House the BB is weak, and the iPhone slightly degraded. Up the street towards Chinatown, the BB gets a slightly better signal for a few blocks.

Most places they both have 4 or 5 bars. Same in Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Minneapolis, Dallas, Alpine, Fort Davis, Marfa .... on and on. Neither one is obviously better than the other, with this single exception: when the signal is weak, and the phone is powering up its amplifier to pull in the weak signal, the Storm, and the 8830 before it, will eat its battery in a matter of a few hours: Far faster than the iPhone will. Not that the iPhone won't eat its battery fast: it does. Just not as fast.

This inverts when Bluetooth is the radio in question. If the iPhone can not find the Bluetooth ear piece, it will burn through the juice in the matter of less than 8 hours, where as the Storm and the 8830 seemed to not obviously use any more power when their paired earpiece was off or out of range.

(Update: Actually, the Storm does appear to use battery far faster when it can not find it's headset. Still not as bad as the iPhone, but the 8830 was the king here.)

As for speed: There is no comparison. As long as I have digital service the iPhone is far faster. the iPhone in Edge is about the same speed as the Storm on "1XEV'. That probably means the high speed EVDO is not the bottleneck more than likely, but the speed of the OS and the hardware is.

Smart Phone

If there had never been an iPhone to compare it to I would be amazed by the Storm, but the fact of the matter for me and my virtual keyboard loving ways is that it is not as good a design as the original iPhone was, more or less the 3rd generation iPhone. I assume the Storm 2 will be better on all points, but I also assume from some early reviews that it will be only reaching some sort of parity with the Generation 1 iPhone, and still be a long way from where the iPhone is today. If nothing else the push-the-whole-screen-to-register-a-keystroke thing is gone.

I rode in an elevator the other day with a man who had a Storm. I asked him how he liked it. He shook his head, and said "I had a Google phone before this one. I wish I had it back".

On the plane the other day I sat next to a man with a Palm Pre. I watched with interest as he flicked about the bright, beautiful screen. It looked very iPhone like, at least until he opened the keyboard. Gaah! Chiclet keys! What were they thinking?

Still, from what I can tell, the Storm is not as good as iPhone's, Palm Pre's, and Android based phones. It is not just a hardware problem either: the OS is a mess. It feels like three of four different OS's crammed together. Configuration screens don't match in style or function, and are spread all over, The Apps are weak, and un-unified in look, feel, and OS integrations. The Storm, running WebOS or Android would be leaps and bounds better, and not having the push-to-click screen of the Storm two would fix the Storms major weakness: Really: That idea is like New Coke. It may have tested well, but in reality it is a pain.

I'll have this Storm for another two years I guess. Hopefully by then RIM will get it right. In the meantime, it *is* far better than the 8830 that came before it, so I am not ungrateful. And the camera isn't bad.

The Dell Mini 9 Rides Again

I read today that Michael Dell does not like Netbooks. He thinks that people buy them as notebook replacements and then are not happy when they don't work well as notebook replacements.

This is at direct odds with the fact that Dell brought back (even for a limited time) the Mini 9 after killing it off because so many people still wanted one, including me.

I can't see using a full size notebook on the two foot diameter table I am sitting at right now at Elevation Burger (one of my favorite Austin eateries) either.

I suspect Netbook's days are numbered though. If Apple or MS ever ship a real tablet PC in this form factor, and even better, use a virtual keyboard like the iPhone's, then the reason for a Netbook will, at least for me, have passed. I can blog from the iPhone of course, but I'd rather use the Netbook for screen and keyboard reasons. Here is a case where the Netbook beats the next smaller form factor (smartphone) all hollow, as well as the next larger (notebook). Sure: I'm a wimp: There are people that have written entire novels using a old cell phone and t9 text entry. Airplane tray tables are another place a netbook wins over a regular notebook.

Dell was very clear that the Mini 9's reprieve was to be very short term. Looking at the web site right now I do not see it any more, though my new Mini 9 arrived yesterday. Even if the M9 is the oldest unit in the lineup, it is also the asiest to upgrade things like RAM and SSD. Dell did not aparently learn anything when they designed the Mini-9, because the 10/10v are much harder to work on. Hello?

By MS's definition the new M9 is not a netbook: it has (gasp) 2GB of RAM. Not allowed. Since the new unit has Linux on it, not Windows, what MS defines is not relevant.

My new Mini 9 came about because I gave the last one to my wife, my Acer Aspire One to my daughter, and so made room for a new Mini 9.

Since this was going to be the last chance to get a Mini 9, I splurged on a few options, adding the 1.3 Megapixel webcam and internal Bluetooth, thus driving the system cost up... to about 229 USD. My Apple Bluetooth Mighty Mouse sync's up and works like a champ. The 2GB 533 Mhz PC5300 memory stick added another 25 USD to the price.

I'll put in a 32GB SuperTalent or Runcore SSD in the near future to replace the 4GB unit it came with. Something far faster than the factory default unit.

That 4GB unit looks like it is having problems anyway: Ubuntu's Palimpsest utility keeps issuing messages that the hard drive is failing: That the hard drive is being used "outside design parameters", although it passes self test. Whatever. I bought this unit knowing that the SSD had to go.

I put as 32GB SuperTalent unit in my wife's Mini 9 and it is *much* faster, not to mention handy to have the extra space.

I never booted the pre-installed Ubuntu that Dell put on this M9. Ubuntu 8.04.1 is just too far back level for me, not to mention that when I booted it on my wifes Mini 9 a while back it was slow slow slow. I love that Dell gives me the option to buy Linux, but I wish it was a more current version, and a better, i386 version, build. The "lpia" binaries of the default install are just suboptimal.

It's an easy fix. I loaded up the current Beta of 9.10 (which GA's this month) and while it took a while because of the slow SSD, it is fast now that it is down. I watched an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer off Hulu last night without too many frame freezes. That is the point of a netbook after all: look at Net stuff. Well, that, and actually be of a size that you might have it with you at odd times when you need a computer for something but don't have one. Emergency idea documentation. Blog ideas that strike while at lunch. Etc.

The Broadcom Wifi Card required activating a non-opensource driver via Administration/Hardware Drivers. No big deal, but I did have to plug in to the wired Ethernet long enough to have the tool go get the drivers.

With 9.10, and Bilbo from KDE installed, the 4GB drive is nearly full: /dev/sda1 3423336 2891716 357720 89% /. I have a 2GB SD card in the slot to give me some elbow room, and use flash drives to store and move things around.

No fans: The little unit is disorientingly quiet. Unlike the Acer, there is no temptation to play with the power management. It just works. 46C is about as hot as it ever gets.

Like the Acer before it, I imagine I'll get the 8 cell battery at some point (The Acer was a 9 cell actually). Going all day between charges is just too nice.

One of the reasons people do not like the Netbook form factor is the small keyboard, and like any small keyboard, the Dell Mini 9 takes some getting used to. The Acer Aspire 1 keeps the key size ratios the same across all the keys, and more or less just shrinks the keyboard. The M9 went a totally different way. The Alpha keys are nearly full size. numerics are slightly smaller. Punctuation are smaller still. There are no dedicated PF keys at all. It is very weird. It is probably why Dell is pushing the 10 and 10v with its its more normal layout and 92% of full size keys, although the fact that the 10/10v cost a bit more probably helps too.

Time to watch some more Buffy....

Your Problems Are Fixed in the Next Release: Mint 7

Back in January I posted about installing Ubuntu 8.10 on my dad's HP DV9000 laptop. There was also a followup to that post about DOSBOX .

At the end of the Ubuntu Install, and after using it for a few weeks, there were three issues:

1. Wifi: it worked, but with a work-around
2. DOSBOX was slower than DOSEMU, but DOSEMU required manual setup: Another workaround
3. On reboot, Dad had to hit enter about 30 times to get past various hangs being caused by the oddball ACPI on the DV9000. If I understood this correctly, it only showed up as a problem when the AMD CPU's were being used in the DV9000. Those are what Dad had of course...

I had tested the first two points at length with my research into Ubuntu 9.04: I knew that once I upgraded Dad's computer that those two issues would be resolved. I do not have an HP DV9000 though, so I had no way of verifying that the third point would be taken care of as well.

If you noticed the infrequency of my recent posting (both here and at BMC), you might have guessed I had been kidnapped by space aliens, but the truth is I was just working 70-90 hour weeks getting ready and implementing a data center migration. With that in the past, it was time to rest, and then to catch back up on all the other things I had been letting fall to the side.

In the mean time, not only had Ubuntu 9.04 GA'ed, but Mint 7 after that. I took both on USB fobs to Dad's house, and test booted both. Both worked fine: no ACPI hangs at all.

I talked about it with Dad, and we decided to put in Mint 7: Same as my brothers Linux system will be getting soon.

The install was straightforward, other than the install complaining about not having a swap partition. with 4GB of RAM, I just did not want to have to add an LVM to the boot disk in order to get the 5th partition on it. Dads disk already had 4 partitions: 2 NTFS (Vista and the recover partition) and 2 Linux: '/' and '/home'.

I set '/' to format, '/windows' as ntfs, and '/home' as ext3, and both to mount at boot. Once the gparted was done, it took about 4 or 5 minutes to install Mint 7.

Once up, we updated the packages, and installed DOSEMU.

DOSEMU, as delivered, configured the 'D' drive as /home/dad already, and the vbdos programs were already installed there, so it was a simple matter to cd to D, then to the programs, and then to run his NASA stuff.

What DOSBOX takes 30 seconds to run, DOSEMU takes 3. And it is graphical data, so Dad was interested in how to print it and screen capture it so it could be emailed. It turns out that this is easy under DOSEMU as well: Just full screen by clicking the center box on the upper right hand corner, and then fn-prtscrn, and Gnome pops up the screen, all captured and ready to save. A quick trip through GIMP to crop out the tool bars and the graphical display on the DOSEMU screen is ready to email or print to be added to a report.

One interesting thing: If we full screened the DOEMU window *before* we ran the program, then it would run more slowly: Maybe 20 seconds rather than 3. Faster than DOSBOX still, but much slower than EMU was normally. Dad made the easy decision to always run the programs first, then to full-screen them.

Everything works:

Display: Mint prompted for the install of the NVidia drivers, and we told it to go do it.

The Wireless stuff just works now.

We plugged in the HP printer, and Mint saw and configured it instantly. We also tried a Lexmark multifunction (resold by Dell), but that did not. I did not expect it to, since Lexmark printers are one of the few anymore that ship without Linux capabilities from the vendor.

Sound: The Altec Lansing speaker make all the right sounds: I am not sure that Altec Lansing should be claiming these speakers as theirs, but that is another story. They sound equally tinny on Vista. I fired up Rhythmbox and we listened to some Internet Radio for a bit.

Boot Speed: Fedora 11 is making a lot of noise about their new 20 second boot speed. I tested it, and on my desktop Dell 945, it is 30 seconds: Same as Mint 7 on Dad's DV9000.

Battery: This dv9000 is only 9 months old now, but Linux reported that its battery was only able to charge up to 80% of its design capacity: Something Vista was reporting as 100%.

And so forth: What a difference 6 months makes in Linux land. Dad was thrilled with the computer, and said that, other than to play a RealArcade game called WordSlinger, he did not see ever having to go back to Vista. I tried briefly to get that going under WINE, but it was acting very weird: Another thing to research!

Out and about with the Acer Aspire One and Ubuntu 9.04

Please bring your netbooks to the upright and locked position...

As I type this, I am winging my way to the San Francisco Bay Area. The Acer Aspire One (AA1) is in its natural habitat, i.e., a tray table on a crowded 737-800/900 (it does not say which...). All seats are filled, and there is no spare room for anything, much less a large laptop.

Since I last traveled with the Acer, I have made a few changes to the AA1. I upped the RAM to 1.5 GB, so that for a simple edit session with OpenOffice WebWriter, I am only using 11% of the memory. 38% is in use as cache, and the rest is just waiting for something to do. Don't get this wrong though. I am not sorry I upped the RAM, even it it was a real PITA relative to something like the Dell Mini-9 or even an Apple Macbook. If I could have gone 2GB, I would have. On the plane I am trying to conserve power and only have OpenOffice WebWriter open. On the ground, in a library, or at Starbucks I might have seven or eight things going at once, and then the RAM is handy. Besides, on any notebook computer, I like as big a disk cache as I can get to "speed up" (I.E. cache) the writes to the typical 4200 or 5400 RPM disk.

The other big change is that the netbook is running Ubuntu 9.04 GA, and while I experimented with it for a while, I have taken off the Ubuntu NetBook Remix (UNR). Mostly this was because I use Gnome desktops on all my other Linux systems right now, and while I like Netbook remix, I prefer to be able to window the desktop from time to time, even on the tiny netbook screen. Sure, I could use the desktop switcher to run over to classic mode, and then pop open a window and tell Maximus to stop maximizing everything.. but then I'd have to undo all that when I switched back. Ultimately I decided that the eye candy of NetBook Remix was not worth the hassle. I can always turn on Compiz if I want eye candy. What is still impressive to me is that this little unit can do the eye candy with Linux and not be noticeably slowed by it. I will probably replace the XP install on this unit with the GA of Windows 7 at some point, and it will be interesting to compare those two on the same box. Hard to see the Aero effects (even of the tweaked out Win7) working very well, but who knows? Linux can do composited graphics on a netbook. Surely MS won't leave that gauntlet tossed to the ground forever.

Heat and Noise

I experimented around with the 'acerhdf' kernel module, and it worked more or less as advertised, at least as far as keeping the CPU fan turned off most of the time, but I did not like how warm the AA1 became when it was installed, and the Wifi would start to act flakey after a while, so I disabled it for now. Fan runs more especially when on A/C power, but the systems stays cooler to the touch and the Wifi has not wigged out since. I assume without sensor data or thermal scans to back me up that the Atherosw Wifi card was getting too hot.

The main problem that the acerhdf was trying to address was how noisy the AA1 is, but if I am listening to music on the iPhone, or typing blog entries on an airplane, I can not hear the fan at all, so why take the chance of heat damage (further heat damage?). It was all really Dell Mini-9 envy anyway, because that little unit runs dead quiet: Does not even have a fan. Might as well face it: The AA1 is not the Dell, and if quiet is key, get the Mini-9.

A disappointment so far as it relates to heat is how few sensors appear to through ACPI to the lm-sensors code. I run the Gnome applet to monitor that and all I can see are the hard drive (42C right now...) and another one called 'temp1' out of 'libsensors', but it always reads 0C, so whatever that is it is not being accessed correctly. Whatever temp1 is, it did not even appear under Ubuntu 8.10, so I assume someone is working on getting the AA1 sensors mapped correctly. The best computer I have ever had in this regard was the IBM T41: It had a whole raft of instrumentation. CPU, Graphics, batteries, various memory, i/o busses.... the works. I gues you could make the case that the IBM was a top of the line (at the time) business computer, and the AA1 is a 300 USD or less consumer unit... but really: Do thyristors cost that much? Would one on top of the CPU and another on the Wifi card really jack the price up that much? If so, then how about Intel and Atheros just build that stuff in to everything they make?

Battery Park

When I bought the AA1, most of the units being sold had 3 cell batteries and 120GB hard drives. As I noted here in past posts about the AA1, the box my unit came in said it had 120GB HD, but it was really a 160GB, and that is de rigueur these days for the Netbooks with mechanical hard drives.

The 3 cell battery that came with the unit has 2200 mAh, and was good for about 1.8 hours of usage. Another reason I was interested in the acerhdf module was to keep the fan off as much as possible, and make the battery last as long as possible. 1.8 hours is barely more than one meeting, and does not even come close to one Austin to San Francisco plane trip, or one Houston to Alpine train trip.

Backing up for a sec to the heat thing: it should be noted that the fan does run less often when the AA1 is not plugged in. It appears to do a better job dialing itself down, and running with less heat when unplugged, It does this without any obvious slowing of the computer, so I am not sure why it does not manage its power/heat a little better when on A/C.

Acer had 6 cell batteries as an option for the AA1, but I had never seen one at retail back at my time of purchase and come to think of it I still have not. In fact, one Fry's ad at the time noted that they had the 120GB / 6 cell config, and when I went there they had the 160Gb / 3 cell config. Only way I have seen to get a 6 cell battery from Acer as the stock install is to order it that way. That is just my experience, as I have read accounts of people finding them in the wild.

No matter what, the 3 cell I had was just not going to get it done. Even my Macbook Pro from three years ago has longer battery life (and I have not been deeply impressed by the MacBook Pro's batteries, but that is another post). I decided to order a 9 cell, 7200 mAh replacement. There are several makes and models out there, and I found a manufacturer in the US that makes a 7800 mAh unit … right after I had ordered mine. Doh.

Mine came from Global Laptop Batteries, and it appears to be a decent unit. See picts. Ignore the Apple logo. That is just dreaming... or a Dell Mini-9 converted to OS.X. Not the Acer. It is a bad OS.X candidate, not even counting EULA's and all.

Overall the Global buying experience was mixed. The battery shipped almost immediately from Hong Kong, according to the USPS, but from then on it was never really clear where they were. The steep 20 USD in shipping did not buy any sort of enhanced tracking, and the battery was two weeks in arriving.

7200 mAh gives 6+ hours of power cord free time, especially here on the airplane with the Wifi off. Probably closer to seven, but I am not measuring it with any precision. I have used it for three hours messing around and writing this, and still have 4 hours runtime left according to the battery meter. Wonder what that 7800 mAh would do...

If this ebay deal is any good, it would run rings around the deal I got.

The 9 cell battery is tall, and I rather like that, as it angles the keyboard towards me on the tray. Much nicer to type on with the tall battery installed. Cuts less into my palms at the edges of the keyboard, as there is no real 'palmrest' on something this small.

It is a big battery: I have not weighed the AA1, but it is probably 3 pounds now. It is a good tradeoff, especially as the battery is shaped such that now the AA1 has a nifty handle on it, although before carrying it all over the place with the 'handle', make sure the battery lock slide is engaged! I'm just sayin'....

With the 'handle', any extra weight is not really noticeable, and I do tend to carry it around sans bag and power cord now, so I am probably saving weight overall.

Ubuntu 9.04 GA

Ubuntu 9.04 itself is a thing of beauty. The performance on the Acer is crisp until I start trying to manipulate photos. That can insert pauses and make the fan run a bit. Firefox, when pointed at a page with a lots of Web 2.0 stuff like Gmail will also crank up the fan, although the browser stays fast. I run the FF 3.5 beta 4 rather than the Ubuntu sourced 3.0.10 though. One of the things Beta 4 brings to the table is better speed in Javascript, which helps all the Google apps. Except one. Google Gears is not yet updated to support it, so I can not run offline Gmail or Docs without reverting to 3.0.10. No problem: I have both Firefox versions installed if needed.

One app that does not run well is Google Earth. it just needs more CPU/graphics mojo than this little Netbook has. Maybe a Linux native version would work better, but not this boxed WINE version.

With 1.5 GB of RAM, having both browsers running, plus OpenOffice , Rhythmbox (for Internet Radio) , and a few other things is no problem. Everything launches very quickly as well, and relaunches from cache are even better. OpenOffice has been rapped over the years for its slow initialization, but I just re-launched the WebWriter and it came up in 3 seconds. Netbooks may be minimal hardware by todays standards, but Linux is still lean and mean enough to make them seem pretty crisp most of the time... as long as you are not running the a mini-9 with Dells default LPIA Ubuntu 8.04 build... You listening out there Dell?

Aside: I have read that Win7's most basic version will limit one to only running three things at once. With Ubuntu 9.04 on either the Acer of the Dell Mini-9 with its 2GB, I have never hit the limit for how many apps I can open. Either machine stays responsive well past three things running at once. That limit is clearly not being imposed by the hardware. In my testing of Win7 Beta I have seen that while it is faster than Vista, it is slower than XP SP3. Win7 RC is supposed to be faster than the Beta, So I assume that the limit is just there to make people want to install XP SP3 again.....

Do You See What I See?

Even Internet video does not work too bad on this AA1. With Flash 10 installed, I can watch Hulu or MSNBC's news programs while on the road. The screen is bright and beautiful, the contrast ratio better than the new MacBook (but not the new Macbook Pro...), the wide screen perfect for movies. This puts a lie to the recent statement by Apple that Netbooks are 'junky'. Don't believe me: Go in to the Apple store. Fire up iPhoto on a Macbook, and a Macbook Pro. Navigate to the same picture on both, and one with good contrast and lots of black. The Macbook.. the brand new cadillac carved from a block of aluminum Macbook... has dark gray on the screen rather than black. Sorry: no room to be calling Netbooks junky till your own house is in order there Apple.

Video is the leading edge of the Netbooks 1.6 Ghz Atom CPU though: pretty much nothing else can be happening on the computer if you want the video to be smooth. When in a hotel room on the road, the little AA1 is perfect for sitting in the bad and watch programming till ready for sleep. Here is a place where the AA1 appears to slightly exceed the Dell Mini-9.

AA1 to Dell Mini-9 Comparisons

I can watch video on the Mini-9 (when my wife lets me see it) as well, but its screen does not appear to be quite as bright, and since the unit is fanless it feels like it dials itself down to stay cool far faster. It may just be that the Dells stock SSD is just slower. I am looking at the high performance (appears to be mostly from RunCore) and larger stock speed SSD's available for the 9 because while Ubuntu 9.04 does fit in the 2GB SSD, it leaves little room for growth or patching. The SSD price points are shifting so quickly right now it is hard to determine what the best deal is. As i write this, a 32Gb SSD at stock speed is about 80USD, and a RunCore high speed SSD is about 130USD. The main difference is that the write speeds are about 4x faster. Read speeds are a tiny bit slower. For standard writing and web browsing, I am not sure the performance is worth the price.

One of the things I like to use the AA1 for is to listen to Internet Radio. Mostly stations like WBUR, KQED, or Air America, While Rythmbox is a great app for that, the AA1 speakers suck rocks. Here is another place where the Dell exceeds it, as it has tiny but fairly usable speakers at the base of the monitor, facing forward towards the listener. If you are going to have a fat bezel around a monitor, why not use it for something? What a terrific idea! Plenty of room on the Acer monitor bezel for speakers... but no. Music on the 9 is passable as long as it is not serious listening, just low volume background. 'All Things Considered' or 'The Rachel Maddow Show', being mostly speaking voice, come through fine on the Mini-9.

The AA1 by contrast has speakers mounted facing downwards, just under the 'palm rest', and the 9 cell battery tips the unit forward, closing out some of the air space between the speakers and whatever the AA1 is sitting on. I invested 10 dollars in a pair of battery powered speakers, and while they are not great, they are portable, tuck in luggage nicely, and bring the AA1's sound back to at least as good as the Dell mini-9's. They also will run off the USB port for power, so the batteries inside the speakers last a good long while, even though they are AAA size. For really good sound, I have the Altec Lansing portable speakers that I use with my iPod.

Back to Ubuntu

One of Ubuntu 9.04's new features is the unified message center. It took me a bit to get used to that, especially as the NetManager icon sits in it, and when I upgraded one of my test machines to 9.04 I had lost the icon for the NetManager out of the Gnome toolbar, and it was driving my nuts trying to figure out how to get it back. FWIW, should this happen to you, it is called the 'Notification AREA' in the 'add to panel dialog (right click on tool bar to access). Ubuntu also moved the power down / suspend / hibernate button to the notification area from the 'system' menu. Took me a couple times to figure that out. Now that I know what it is, what has been centralized there I like it. It is a very clean way to present all of these functions. Avahi Autodiscover reports what it finds there as well.

Herein lies another reason I switched back to the classic menus from the Ubuntu NetBook-Remix. I keep my tool bar stocked with all sorts of applets: launchers for terminal and Firefox, remote console access, sensor and system performance data, weather, and so forth. NetBook-Remix only displays some of these things, because it re-tasks part of the toolbar for the top of the currently focused window. I get it. It makes great use of the screen real estate, and lets the focused app fill the screen. If I were building a NetBook for a Linux neophyte, I would install NetBook Remix as the default. When I handed the Mini-9 over to my wife, I had NetBook-Remix as the default in fact. It was the first thing she turned off. I assumed that, since she is primarily a Mac user these days she would like UNR better than Gnome. Nope. Her UNIX system programmer genes reasserted themselves immediately. She wanted multiple windows available. She wanted drag and drop to the desktop. UNR was making everything too simple. Oh well. The desktop switcher makes short work of flipping back and forth, though I note she never does. She has left Maximus intact though.

One of the funny things about the AA1 (and probably most netbooks right now) is how often when I am using it out and about at someplace like Starbucks or Taco Bell that people stop and ask me questions about it.

• How well does it work?

• Which one do you have?

• Did you look at any others?

• Are you glad you got it?

• Was it worth the price

• How well does Linux work on it?


• Can you really use Linux to replace Windows?

It's kind of fun to be able to talk about it with people, and, unlike some things, no one appears to find you too geeky or perhaps even a little elitist (a unfortunate common reaction to an Apple MBP). People seem to get that this is a computer that almost anyone can afford. In fact, based on some of the conversations I have had recently, I think there is a great unmeasured consumer group out there: Those who have wanted computers but never thought they could afford one before now. Those for whom this will be not be an ancillary, special purpose computer, but their first and only computer.

Acer Aspire One, Ath5k, and Ubuntu 9.04

In my last post about the Acer Aspire One (AA1) and Ubuntu 9.04, I mentioned that everything was working in Ath5k land. In retrospect, that post did gloss over a few details, so I thought I'd put up a special AA1 / Ubuntu 9.04 / Ath5k post to clarify a few things.

First off, in a fresh install, it probably just works. Maybe. Maybe not. I have not tried it yet. The AA1 I have started as Alpha 6, and has been doing near daily dist-upgrades to pick up new service along the way. As it pertains to the Ath5k module, new kernels and kernel modules. 2.6.28.11.14 is where I am at right now on the AA1. I saw a new kernel come down on a different test box earlier today, so I need to update again.

Previously on the AA1, under Mint, I was using ndiswrapper to get the wireless going, and when I first got the Ath5k stuff going there were a few tricks to it. First, I had to turn *off* ndiswrapper of course. That was easy: I have installed ndisgtk, so in the GUI, I just removed the driver. Same thing as 'sudo ndiswrapper -r net5416' at at command line

At that point, I could *not* see the wireless any more. This is because of the module 'acer_wmi'. The only problem acer_wmi causes on the AA1 is in the ability of Linux to see the Ath5k... but that is bad enough. A netbook without WIFI is not doing what it is supposed to be doing.

If you read through that bug, it says that the very latest kernel has the patch required to fix this rfkill issue. Will try and update this in a bit.

In the meantime: Simple solution is to blacklist it in /etc/modprobe.d. One line file:

steve@kara:/etc/modprobe.d$ more blacklist-acer-wmi
blacklist acer_wmi

You could also just rmmod acer_wmi, and then 'modprobe ath5k' but blacklisting makes acer_wmi stay out between boots.

Ubuntu 9.04 with ath5k on the AA1 is a lovely thing. Wifi recovers from standby without any issues so far. Under Mint/ndiswrapper about 1 out of every 10 time the WIFI would go away some place, and require severe measures to get it back. It also seems to be faster finding and syncing with WAP's now.

Update

It's working. Mostly

I did an 'sudo apt-get update | sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade' and a new kernel came down: 2.6.28-11.39. if you were to look with 'uname -a' you'd think this was the same kernel, since uname drops the '.39'. Have to do a 'dpkg -l | grep -i 2.6.28-11' or something similar to see what is installed. I then erased my blacklist of the acer_wmi in /etc/modprobe.d (see above)

After the service I rebooted, and it still did not work. I manually did a 'modprobe ath5k', and it started working. puzzled, I looked in /etc/modprobe.d and wondered if the ndiswrapper file there was interfering. I did not put it there: Pretty sure it was created when I installed ndiswrapper. I deleted it (sudo delete /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper) and rebooted.

Instant success. Even see the hidden wireless where I am right now.

The wireless blinking LED is not lit though. Not sure why, and don't really care right now. That is a problem for another day. I am just happy to have the Acer_wmi loading so I can see if that makes a difference in how much the fan runs.

Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 6, the Acer and the Dell

Since I last posted here, there has been a lot of work done on Ubuntu, getting ready to ship next month. What has changed on my end is two things: The addition of a Dell Mini-9 to the mix, and getting Alpha 6 working on the Acer Aspire One (AA1)

The Dell Mini-9

The Dell Mini-9 came into my hands, albeit briefly, last week. I bought it as a gift for my wife, although she does not know it yet. It shipped with Ubuntu 8.04.1, and a "special" low power version of it at that: All the complaints I have seen about the speed of the Mini-9 can be traced directly back other fact that it is *not* an I3/4/686 version of the binaries, but a special compile for the low power version of the Atom called "lpia". It is not horribly slow at that, but it is not great ether. The Acer with Mint 5 on it ran rings around it side by side, and the Dell has 2GB where the Acer has 1.5 GB. Neither are memory constrained, yet the Dell was slower.

Backing up for a second: the Mini-9 came with 512MB, and when I plopped in the 2GB chip, it made very little difference to the speed. A very undramatic upgrade. The good news there is that Linux still runs great in 512MB....

The "lpia" version of the Ubuntu 8.04.1 has another problem: Not much appears to be compiled for it, so if you go into a tool like "Synaptic" and try to add things, rather than the 26,000 some odd packages, that are far less: Forgot to count. Already installed over it. Worse, even with software sources set to do all versions, not just LTS (System / Administration / Software Sources) it still would not update to 8.10.... Because Dell has not done an lpia version of 8.10 yet and released it. The Atom can run X86, so lpia had to go.

For all the trouble with software upgrades, the Dell beats the pants off the Acer for hardware upgrades: The hatch on the bottom opens with two screws, and there is the memory slot, the SSD slot, the WIFI slot, and an empty one labeled WWAN on the mainboard silkscreen. The Acer required taking nearly the whole thing apart to get at the same bits.

Then there is that capability to take a 2GB memory chip (in my case a Patriot PSD22G8002S, or PC-2-6400 800 Mhz). The BIOS on the Acer can only take a 1GB unit. Phooey. And now I have another 512 MB chip to find some use for. Someone needs to make chip stackers again....

The next upgrade the Mini-9 will get will be to replace the 4GB SSD. I tried to get one from Fry's, but all they had were the full length, EEPC style units. The Dell has a half length mini-PCI slot. A quick look around the Internet, and it appears I won't have any problem finding something. Probably a 32GB SSD. Linux does not need that space: It fits easily inside of the 4GB, but as I learned, it is really easier to keep /home on the SSD too and sync it to the SD or USD Flash drives later for backup. More on that in a sec. Coming from the Acer's 160GB moving-parts-hard-drive, it is a very different world.

I created a USB stick with Ubuntu Alpha 6 on it (same procedure as in "Mint 6 RC1 on the Acer Aspire One") and booted the Mini-9 off it. My first pass was to put in a 2GB SD card and make that /home, but that caused all sorts of issues with suspend / resume and reboots, where apparently the MMC driver was not being installed soon enough in the boot so that /home was not available. Grrr.

One thing about the Ubuntu 9.04 installer: They changed the Time Zone selector. Much much much better. Now you just see the 24 time zones. Neat world map too. Thank you Ubuntu folks!

I guess I could take the mount of the SD card (/dev/mmcblk0p1) out of the /etc/fstab and put it in rc.local or something as a mount, so that everything would be up first, but I'll let my wife figure that out. I am not really sure what she'll do with this unit. Another option would just be to have Conduit (very nifty app!) sync the SSD version of /home with the SD card from time to time.

Even though the Dell has a Broadcom Wifi card, Linux loaded it up and it worked right out of the box: In fact, everything did. Install was dead easy if slightly slower than I would have expected. SSD's are slow on write.

I went ahead and installed the Netbook-Remix while I was at it to see how that compared to the Netbook desktop that Dell had provided on the default 8.04.1 install. The answer was that the Ubuntu Netbook stuff is IMHO far better. If nothing else, faster since it is X86, not lpia. But I liked the whole setup better: I imagine Dell will at least think about using the Distro default version at some point rather than continuing to maintain their own version of a desktop, whenever they get around to supporting 9.04.

Turn off Compiz if you use the Netbook desktop. Compiz will load by default, and even works on the little netbook fairly quickly, but the Netbook launcher and Compiz hate each other. Very frakkin ugly.

I tweaked out the Mini 9, and basically have it ready to give to my wife, so now I have to quit playing with it. Its bad enough I opened her present I guess, but Ubuntu 8.04.1 really had to come off there first, or she would have thought the Mini-9 was not so frelling great.

There: A Farscape and BattleStar word, and not half done! Geek Points!

Acer Aspire One and A6

The AA1 may not be as easy to upgrade, hardware-wise, as the Dell, but it is still a nifty little unit. There are two things about it that beat the Dell: The screen is better a little better (brighter, deeper colors), and I like the keyboard better. The AA1 keyboard has slightly smaller keytops, because it has 6 rows of keys rather than five. The Mini-9 drops the PF key row, and embeds those as fn- keys (Like fn-a is F1) in the regular keyboard. Further the Mini-9 messes around with where the single and double quotes are, and the vertical bar, which I use all the time on Linux, is also a fn- type key. PF11 and PF12 are just gone. The Mini-9 BIOS uses regular letters at boot to control getting into setup or changing the boot order.

I liked that the keys were a little bigger on the Dell, so while I prefer the Acer, I could live with the Dell. it will be interesting to see how my wife, a blindingly fast touch typist, adapts to the Dell.

The Acer has my normally prefered Atheros Wifi card, but with Ubuntu and 8.10 and the mess around the "ath5k" drivers that has actually favored the Dells Broadcom chipset. Weird.

Once I had the Dell dialed in with Ubuntu 9.04 A6 and the new Netbook desktop, I liked it so much I wanted the exact same thing on my Acer. As I wrote here back in January about Alpha 3 ("Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3 on the Acer Aspire One... briefly"), the Wifi mess was still not sorted, but I was ready to try again. After all, GA is next month! This had to be close I thought.

It is, but it was not easy like the Dell.

I booted the USB, and installed Ubuntu 9.04 A6 for the second time. It installed more quickly than on the Dell, because the SSD drive is slower on writes than the round-and-brown of the Acer. Actually, last time I took apart a disk drive, the platters were silver now, not brown. But I digress...

It booted up, and my misery started. There were two issues, but it took me a while to find them:

1) acer_wmi module has to be blacklisted, or you can not use the Gnome desktop network widget for connecting to Wifi. I had to hand code 'iwconfig' statements at command line till I figure that out. No biggie, but the widget is so much better.

2) And this is the one that really killed me: For reasons I do not know, my repository sources were set to default to Chile. I could not figure out why Synaptic / apt-get update were taking so long to refresh, and why I could only see about 6,000 packages after they had refreshed. It was making me crazy! Lost at least a day to this. The reason I lost part of this time was that until I found the note on an Ubuntu forum about blacklisting acer_wmi I thought I was fighting a network problem with the ath5k stuff still.

As an aside: I am not sure not that I look at it that the problem I was having with the AA1 and the Wifi with Alpha 3 was not the "acer_wmi" thing. I did not dig that deeply then. This time I was determined to make it work.

Next up, the AA1 fan runs way more than it used to under Mint 6. More like the way it does under XP. I do not know why yet. I loaded up "powertop" and had it crank back the write-back settings, and that seemed to help, but it still runs more than it used to. It might be that without the acer-wmi loaded something is not connecting up in power management, but if so, I'll just wait for that to be fixed. I love the Wifi widget too much to lose it. The fan shuts off when the system is unplugged, so it also appears that it is just staying CPU cranked up when it has bounteous electrons.

It all seems so noisy compared to the dead-quiet Mini-9.

The battery life on the AA1 is not great either, and about 2 hours, but it never has been. The battery is just too small. The Dell has a 4-Cell unit, and it good for about twice as much time as the 2-Cell Acer. I should have bought the 4-Cell Acer I guess: I am looking in the after-market at a couple options. The AA1 2-Cell has got to go. It was amazing how much nicer it was to carry around the Mini-9 and not be worried about it running out of power during the day.

Because the AA1 had Mint 6 and a full Gnome desktop on it, I had to clean up the Gnome config files to get the Netbook desktop to look right: Rather than spend a great deal of time thinking about it, I just torched .gconf, .gconfd, .gnome2, and .gnome_private, and restarted Gnome, and the Netbook desktop appeared.

Well, once I turned off Compiz. Boy those two hate each other!

While waiting about today for some lunch, I wrote part of this post on the AA1 in the text editor (since Bloggers interpretation of HTML is kinda sucky) and it was really nice to have the AA1 up on Ubuntu 9.04 with the Netbook desktop. Fast, full featured, and if the usage is slightly different, much easier once used to it on the 1024x600 screen. Several people stopped by to ask about the unit and see how it worked... although one of them was because I have an Apple sticker on the lid. That would be nice: an Apple Netbook. Everything I have read says that is not going to happen though. In the meantime, this all works pretty well. Finally.

Next upgrade to the AA1? I am guessing Mint 7.

Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3 on the Acer Aspire One... briefly

... or, thank goodness for LiveCD's

In truth, when I tested Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3, it was not with a CD at all. Be kind of hard on the Acer: It has no CD, or DVD. With the price of USB Flash drives, does anyone really need CD's or DVD's any more?

I put 9.04 onto on of my flash drives, and booted it to the LiveCD. it booted quickly and without drama. And without Wireless.

This is an Alpha, so no hard, no foul here. I did not like the decision tree that made it so that new Atheros based wireless cards were pretty much cut off in Ubuntu 8.10, and that was part of why I tried this. I wanted to know if this situation had been worked out yet.

No.

Dmsg showed an error in the HAL when it was looking at the Atheros card. They have not gotten here yet. Even though this is kernel 2.6.28, not 2.6.27, this is still broken for now.

Will keep watching, and keep testing. 9.04 still has most of three months yet before they release GA. Based on Alpha three so far, there is a lot left to do. As Richard Meyer suggested here: I may have to try Fedora again....

In the meantime, pulled the Flash drive, and booted back to Mint 6.

Change-up

I have had a blog knocking about in the back of my head for a while. It involved the fact that nothing stays the same in tech: That one can not cling to Windows XP forever for example. It has been a general theme of most of my writing and teaching over the years that one can jump from MS Windows to Linux to OS.X and not suffer serious brain injuries. I came across this article today over at OSnews.com: Don't Blame Windows and KDE for Your Own Aversion to Change by Thom Holwerda

Well, for the most part, there is one post I won't have to write.

Change is not good or bad in and of itself of course. Change just is. It happens, and you deal with it or you don't.

I have famously not been a big fan of MS Windows for a while now, and my reasons have nothing to do with change per se. I just did not like losing large portions of my working life to fighting massive virus outbreaks, or rebuilding computers six months after I had last rebuilt them (Win 95 / 98), or dealing with the garbage that is the Windows Registry. These were all things that were the results of changes, that were, from my point of view, bad.

At the same time (and this will surprise some) I have also been watching Vista closely, and one of my office desktops is Windows 7 Beta. I even kind of like it (but not its registry: Still there). I do not understand the why of some of the changes. They seem arbitrary: What used to be in one place is now, from my point of view, randomly moved to another place. Not sure why. But can I learn where they moved stuff around to and become functional again pretty quickly? Sure. Besides, these days most of the OS is just there to run the web browser, and Firefox and it's brethren are also something that change over time. 3.1 of FF is working far better on my Mac than 3.0.5 was, so change is often very good.

Thom's points about KDE 4 are really well taken. Linus Torvalds famously left KDE for Gnome recently (and here is another post I won't have to write, because Bruce Byfield already wrote it, dang it), and with all the same kinds of bluster that Thom points out about Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols in his piece.

My problem with KDE 4 was not that it was different, it was that it was incomplete. Functionality was not moved, it was just plain missing. Stability, long a hallmark of KDE, was also gone. KDE 4.0 was a beta. KDE 4.0 felt like what Ubuntu 9.04 (last post) feels like right now: A work in progress.

In point of fact, I use Gnome more than KDE not because of anything about the environment and everything about one application: Evolution. This is a work related thing. Evolution is how I read my email and my calendar off MS Exchange, and Evolution is a Gnome project. Evolution, at the moment, works better under Gnome than KDE. That has changed back add forth many many times over the years. And if KDE had a working MAPI interface to their PIM environment (Kontact), I would switch back in a heartbeat.

Some things change, for better or for worse, but one thing that has not changed yet for me is my need to know when my meetings are at.

Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3 First Impressions

With Linux making slow, tiny, incremental inroads all over the place: In Netbooks, phones, embedded appliances, in the BIOS, not to mention Splashtop, and being credited (over credited I think, but whatever) with the recent malaise at Microsoft (although I liked this interview with Jim Zemlin about the issue), it seemed time to have a look at see what Ubuntu was cooking up for its next major release.

I rarely start this early in a release, but there are a few things cooking at I am very curious about right now. Issues in the current Linux versions that I want to see fixed or software features I need added.

DOSEMU

First up is DOSEMU. In Ubuntu 8.10 it is busted, and the problem is not actually DOSEMU but they way in the Ubuntu 8.10 sets up security (SELinux strikes) for the application. DOSEMU. See bug 216398 for details.

I wanted DOSEMU to work, because according to my benchmarking it is far far faster at running VBDOS programs than DOSBOX. One of my dad's programs (see previous posts) takes 20 seconds in DOSBOX takes 3 in DOSEMU.

As of Alpha 3, DOSEMU is fixed!

HP DV9000 Boot Hangs

Next, there is my dad's HP DV9000 itself. It does not boot well under Ubuntu 8.10. Poorly in fact. It appears that the AMD 64 bit Turion processors, a high precision timer, and the HP BIOS all get together for a timeout party that requires keyboard interrupts to get past. Like about 24 of them to finish a boot. Ick. Appears to be this AMD C1E issue, as documented over at Kernel Trap. The workaround is to add noipic noirqdebug, irqpoll, and perhaps some other stuff to the boot line in Grub. Nice guide on changing all that here. This nastiness appears to have entered around kernel 2.6.19, and is still there in 8.10's 2.6.27. Right now 9.04 has 2.6.28, and so I am hoping it will fix some of this without having to do workarounds on the boot options. I will, but that is not the same thing as it working the way it should.

Quick aside here: This DV9000 appears to have been a particularly problematic model of computer for Linux. In point of fact, it was recalled (at least some models) for BIOS issues, so it was no great shakes for anyone for a while. I don't know why Vista does not hang on boot like Linux does, but I assume without any facts to support this that it is because Linux is seeing hardware features (like the high precision timer) and trying to use them, where Vista does not.

I do not yet know what will happen on the DV9000. I installed it on a Dell D620, and there it boots in under 30 seconds.

Netbooks and MAPI

Those are all reasons I wanted to see where Ubuntu 9.04 was going for my Dad's sake. I have another couple. Netbooks. and MAPI.

As noted here, I have an Acer Aspire One, running Mint 6 right now. I like Mint and all, but there are now and again some issues with certain Gnome dialogs being larger then 600 pixels in length. The account set up for Evolution is one of them. Rumor has it that the new version of Gnome, 2.26, that will ship with 9.04 is more Netbook friendly.

The MAPI thing is for work, and revolves around the fact that we are moving to MS Exchange 2007. I will be losing WebDAV access to email, which means I'm back to using IMAP. That is fine as far as it goes, but my calendar will only be on the so-called Outlook Web Interface. So far, Microsoft has not looked at any lightweight web mail clients and ported them to MS Exchange, meaning I have to use the heavy client they supply for calendaring. Double Ick.

Fortunately the EU has forced MS to publish information about MAPI, and the Evolution folks are working hard on making its namesake work against MS Exchange using the same protocol as Outlook. All this is supposed to ship in Ubuntu 9.04, but as of Alpha 3 Evolution is still back level at 2.24.3. 2.26 (same as the Gnome release number these days) is where the MAPI functionality should ship. There will more about all this over at TalkBMCin the near future.

Other General Impressions

It would not be fair to deeply judge Ubuntu 9.04's current state at Alpha three as being totally indicative of what it will be in April when it releases. Everything that is in is working, and smoothly. The boots seem faster. I'll give it a whirl on the Acer Aspire soon, and see how it works there, but I expect that it will be faster than the current Ubuntu 8.10 based Mint 6 is.

I was slightly disappointed when Ubuntu 8.10 shipped without OpenOffice 3.0, and that has been fixed in 9.04. Firefox, at 3.05 is current, but since FF 3.1 is at Beta 2, hopefully it will be at 3.1 by Ubuntu release day. This is probably less critical on Linux than on OS.X. I have not had any real issues with FF on Linux. The Mac is a whole other story, and a whole other post...

Dosbox followup

A quick followup to my last post.

Dosbox has not been a 100% troublefree for my dad. The main problem was that the cursor would go away, never to return, after a screenshot. This did not happen on my Acer, so I could not recreate the issue.

Before I made an on-site visit we tried one thing: installing ksnapshot. That fixed it.

I don't know what the problem was, but ksnapshot is better in any case, because it allows just the window under the cursor to be captured, and without the window borders. No editing required.

It is funny in a way that the KDE screen capture works better on Gnome than the Gnome one does, but that is the beauty of interoperable open standards: best of both can be used.

The other problem is that a new mouse he bought is not working. A Microsoft wireless mouse.

I don't have one of those at home to test either, but I do at the office, and that one works OK. I am thinking bad hardware here, but if he trades it out I hope he gets something I have: Kingston or Logitech. Easier to do remote support when I can replicate the environment. That's why our labs at the office are so big!

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]